1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to an apparatus and a method for the conversion of carbon or carbon-containing compounds in a plasma to carbons having a defined nanostructure.
2. Background Art
The production of carbon, for example soots, from carbon or carbon-containing compounds such as, for example, from hydrocarbons in a plasma is known. Thus, for example, GDR Patent Specifications 292 920, 276 098 and 211 457 relate to the production of soot by cracking hydrocarbons, for example methane, in a hydrogen plasma. The cracking is carried out in a so-called plasmatron (for figure see GDR Patent Specification 211 457) in which a hydrogen plasma jet heated to 3500 to 4000 K cracks the injected hydrocarbon. This apparatus can be described as a standard apparatus for the plasma-chemical production of soots from hydrocarbons. The apparatus mentioned and the methods associated therewith are consequently completely suitable for producing the standard carbons such as soot in a reasonable quality. As current knowledge shows, the carbons which can be produced by the known methods, in particular the soots, are not composed, however, of uniform structures but manifest themselves as a wide distribution of different carbon particles having markedly different nanostructure (shown in FIG. 4 as number of particles as a function of the spacing, c/2, between the planes of the layers in pm). The application characteristics of, for example, a soot produced in accordance with the prior art are consequently the result of an average of the characteristics of the different particles. This is unsatisfactory insofar as particular characteristics of carbon particles having defined nanostructure have hitherto not been available.
On the other hand, a controlled production of such carbons with a narrow distribution of carbon particles, i.e. having defined nanostructure, is not achievable with the known apparatuses from the prior art since it is not possible to produce a controllable and homogeneous plasma zone.